All the alarms were activated in NATO on January 6, 2021, and not because they detected an unknown missile, but because a fanatical crowd stormed the Capitol of the country that leads the alliance. For the second time, the organization witnessed the effects of the dissemination through multiple channels of a swarm of falsehoods, but on that occasion the matter was even more serious than the rain of fakes that riddled the Brexit referendum.
The US Democratic Congresswoman for California Linda Sánchez was in the House of Representatives when the assailants broke in. And he tried to defend himself by placing furniture against the door of the office in which he had taken refuge. Today she is one of the members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly that most drives the project to create a system of defense against “hybrid attacks”. In that forum of deputies from the allied countries, it is the conviction that the assault on the Capitol was the result of one of those attacks.
The project proposes a NATO Democratic Resilience Center to “strengthen the democratic foundations of the Alliance & rdquor ;, says a report from the Parliamentary Assembly. But it goes beyond the theoretical: it foresees the creation of a body for the “detection and fight against disinformation & rdquor;, which tries to alter electoral processes in member states, or destroy the confidence of the population in political leaders. And to explain the latter, he puts a Spanish example with the minister Irene Monteroas the protagonist.
malicious campaigns
The plan has overcome internal reluctance and has an absolute majority in the assembly, after deputies from some countries -including Spain- doubted whether this tool would not collide with freedom of expression.
The project will be discussed, predictably, at the summit of the Atlantic Alliance in Madrid on June 29 and 30, assure Spanish parliamentary sources. The theoretical foundation will be integrated into the Madrid Strategic Concept, which will be drawn up at the meeting.
On November 30, the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, He has already advanced his will to include the issue on the agenda of the summit. In Riga (Latvia), he spoke placing as first of five “critical elements” for the Strategic Concept that of “protecting our values”, which “are under pressure, both from outside our Alliance and from within our own nations”. And he specified it by pointing out: “The authoritarian regimes – alluding to Russia and China – use propaganda and misinformation to undermine our societiesand malicious cyber tools to interfere in our elections”.
The 8-M case
As of the Madrid summit, disinformation will become a formal part of the scenarios of aggression envisaged by NATO, for which an electoral campaign is already a weak flank, and a day of voting a battlefield. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Alliance outlines the project of the Center for Democratic Resilience since it was proposed by its president, the Democrat Gerald Connolyin 2019. It is no coincidence that it was in the middle of the Trump era. His party colleague Linda Sánchez is the author of a base report that has been submitted to the leaders of the Atlantic Alliance.
The dossier proposes that the Democratic Resilience Center be one more structure of NATO, which helps members to “recognize and remedy democratic vulnerabilities that could be used by malevolent actors to spread disinformation and propaganda & rdquor ;.
Congresswoman Sánchez exposes episodes such as the campaign to extend hesitant about vaccines anticovid among the Hispanic minority in the United States, or the Spanish case of Irene Montero, who gives as an example of what she calls “gender disinformation & rdquor ;. Is about erode the authority of women in high public profile through the method, in the midst of a pandemic, of “presenting women in charge of making decisions as incapable of responding effectively to the crisis”.
The report recounts how, after the 8-M of 2020 was celebrated in Spain before the state of emergency was declared, “it was widely disseminated a manipulated video showing Irene Montero, Minister of Equality, coughing at the event”. On Youtube it still circulates under the title “Irene Montero coughing the coronavirus to a grandmother in the face on 8-M”. The report tells NATO: “A subsequent disinformation campaign wrongly accused her of not isolating herself despite having symptoms of covid & rdquor ;.
Spanish consensus
The NATO summit in June 2021 resulted in a statement that accused Russia of having “intensified its hybrid actions against NATO allies and partners (…) This includes the attempted election interference allies and democratic processes & rdquor ;. Today the Alliance detects “intense Russian destabilizing campaigns” in Finland, confirm Spanish military sources, just days before that country formalizes its entry into the North Atlantic Treaty.
Spain, like other NATO countries, takes measures. On the 10th, the BOE published an “Agreement creating the Forum against disinformation campaigns in the field of National Security & rdquor ;, on which many objections have been formulated.
But the two main political forces in the country support the Resilience Center project, and Spain is one of the 20 countries that have expressed their willingness to join the body if it is finally created. the deputy Zaida Quarryformer military officer and socialist spokesman for defense issues, and his PP counterpart, the retired general Fernando Gutierrez Diaz de Otazu, have met with foreign experts, who have finally agreed. Before they asked to be careful with the reluctance of countries like the Baltics: some of their laws against Russian minorities are hardly comparable with a democratic standard.
Linda Sánchez’s report not only points to Russia, but also to non-state anti-system actors, and believes that disinformation attacks damage “the liberal foundations of allied societies (…), limit the ability of citizens to access verified information (…), amplify polarization (…) and undermine public confidence in the elections”.
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The project contemplates the creation of a NATO system against hybrid attacks, with support teams that help local authorities to “identify disinformation vulnerabilities before or during sensitive events.” The proposal exemplifies the websites rumourcontrolfrom the US Department of Homeland Security, Y propastopof the Estonian paramilitary organization Defense League.
Two centers of excellence, one NATO and the other from the EU, could participate in the project: the Center for Cooperative Cyber Defense in Tallinn (Estonia), and the European Center against Hybrid Threats in Helsinki (Finland).